On control of singleton attractors in multiple Boolean networks: integer programming-based method

BACKGROUND: Boolean network (BN) is a mathematical model for genetic network and control of genetic networks has become an important issue owing to their potential application in the field of drug discovery and treatment of intractable diseases. Early researches have focused primarily on the analysis of attractor control for a randomly generated BN. However, one may also consider how anti-cancer drugs act in both normal and cancer cells. Thus, the development of controls for multiple BNs is an important and interesting challenge. RESULTS: In this article, we formulate three novel problems about attractor control for two BNs (i.e., normal cell and cancer cell). The first is about finding a control that can significantly damage cancer cells but has a limited damage to normal cells. The second is about finding a control for normal cells with a guaranteed damaging effect on cancer cells. Finally, we formulate a definition for finding a control for cancer cells with limited damaging effect on normal cells. We propose integer programming-based methods for solving these problems in a unified manner, and we conduct computational experiments to illustrate the efficiency and the effectiveness of our method for our multiple-BN control problems. CONCLUSIONS: We present three novel control problems for multiple BNs that are realistic control models for gene regulation networks and adopt an integer programming approach to address these problems. Experimental results indicate that our proposed method is useful and effective for moderate size BNs.